MEGA Brilliance moment, though spoiler-iffic; Big Bad Burgess gets away with murder by disguising it as an "echo" that Precogs occasionally see even after the murder is supposedly prevented. The reason Agatha believes Anderton doesn't have an alternate future is because Art and Dashiell saw the future where Anderton does kill Crow in a vengeful rage while she saw the less-likely yet remarkably-similar Suicide by Cop future, where Crow yanks Anderton's hand on his gun's trigger to get his family the bribe money. The observers couldn't tell the difference, and neither could she. And all three futures were a brown ball because even the two where Anderton kills Crow out of rage were were also premeditated by Burgess. And Burgess planned for Anderton to be present when the brown ball dropped, ensuring that he would either be arrested on-site or run. The only thing Burgess couldn't see coming was Anderton figuring out everything in time to tell it all to his wife, even if he wasn't free to act on the information himself.

Why did Anderton's ball come out brown, the sign of a premeditated murder? As he stated, he didn't even know the guy. Several possibilities:

Because he wasn't the one who planned it.

Except if that were the case, there really should've been two names on that ball, not one.

Alternatively, it come out brown because it was premeditated, just not in the traditional way. He may not have known the guy, but he probably thought about what he'd do to the person who took his son for a LONG time.

Further alternatively, it came out brown because upon seeing the precog's vision of the murder, he was aware that it would happen ahead of time. Any decision to go through with it would therefore have been influenced by that plan, resulting in premeditation.

How did Burgess get Leo and Anderton to be in the same room at the same time even though Anderton doesn't know who Leo is? He didn't need to, he simply paid Leo to pretend to be the murderer of Anderton's son. At that point the Pre Cogs seeing the murder set the ball rolling for it to happen. It's possible that he even paid multiple people to do this, waiting for one to happen to get the chain of events that would lead Anderton to killing one of them to start.

Dr. Hineman's little demonstration with the moving vine has a double meaning. Her parting words to Anderton, and the vine's increasingly-violent struggles, suggest that any living creature's base instincts will always trump other concerns in a pinch. But Hineman herself is overriding her own instincts even as she says this, by deliberately gripping the vine until it rips her palm open in its efforts to escape being crushed. She's non-verbally showing us that human willpower can override drives that would otherwise be inevitable, and thereby hinting that Anderton will have a choice about killing Crow, or Burgess.

While it is never remarked upon, the sheer prevalence of the Eyedent retinal scanners in the world depicted in the film is terrifying. While its use for security is of debatable merit, the inclusion of it in advertising and general means of identification raises it from extreme measures to oppressive and invasive. The fact that the people living in DC seem to casually accept it as part of their day to day lives, combined with the fact it's never really expanded upon in the film (and treated as if it's a background element), suggests that this has been a part of society for a long enough time to become routine and, perhaps even more jarringly, there is no opposition to that level of invasion. A good example of this would be the Spyder scene. Towards the end as the two Precops are heading through the building, the woman complains not about the scans themselves, more about the police conducting the scans without prior warning and with the creepy little robots. Police invasion of property and essentially searching everyone is left unremarked upon.

Welcome to the future. I routinely buy something from Walmart or wherever, and come home to find an advertisement related to what I bought waiting for me when I check my email or look at a youtube video.

They want to take Precrime national. Presumably, Arthur, Agatha and Dashiell can't see any murders beyond the bounds of D.C. So how are they going to find more precogs? And if they can't find them, will they resort to creating them? The idea becomes horrifying when you remember Iris Hineman's monologue about how the D.C. precogs came to be.

Really the only problem with Precrime is the fact that Director Burgess murdered Anne Lively instead of taking it the courts and leaving it in their hands if the woman should be given her daughter back. Outside of a very complicated coverup to murder Lively and the questionable treatment of the precogs, Precrime really does work.

There is also the issue of just how rare minority reports actually are. Iris states that a Precrime suspect might have a possible alternate future in which they do not commit their ascribed murder, but adds that this happens only "every once in a while," and as Lamar points out towards the end of the film, the comparative rarity of that — even when combined with the Powered by a Forsaken Child treatment of the Precogs — is simply not relevant when weighed against the much, much more common occurrence of soon-to-be murderers who have no alternate futures and so are guaranteed to successfully murder their victims if Precrime doesn't intervene first. So, really, which is the smarter reaction: restructuring Precrime so that the police simply don't pursue a murder suspect when and if they're shown to have a possible alternate future? Or, as they do in the film, shutting the entire system down after that just because of a relatively small number of false positives?

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